It shows when others are online, at least. But at the moment you can't message them, though I do recall a minor comment of it wanting to be a possibility in the future during BlizzCon. We'll see where that goes!

My biggest anticipation that will make me load up this game once: The StarCraft 1 sound track is BACK.

That soundtrack is the best thing they've released since d2 classic. I'm pretty sure they just re-rendered the audio with higher settings, as they are very close to the originals. Basically, this is what sc2 should have been released with.

Even today, the music is good. It's not really nostalgic for me. It's just good music. Very pleased with it.

Battle.net app? Looking it over, it seems like a primitive incarnation of Steam that only works for 4 games. If they treat it more like a launcher and less like a "keep me on all the time!" resource glutton, then I won't mind the Blizzard-umbrella convenience. But if it is at all intrusive, or takes away any kind of control from me, it can die in a fire. I have enough shit running; if my computer starts acting up, I want as few culprits as possible.

So 2.1 will finally be introducing real mods, eh? What a wonder. Only took 3.5 years. I'm kinda glad they chopped up the campaign into expansions and decided to commit; I don't think the editor community would have got near as much attention otherwise.

There should be a way around the file size limitation at least, you can still have custom dependencies right? Then it's more of an account hosting size limitation, and maybe you can use dependencies in your mod that are hosted by other accounts, then it's a limitation of just how much money you are willing to give Blizzard just to host a large mod. :great idea:

Any kind of mod making use of the full range of custom assets would be pushing several gb easily. Blizzard knows this as well because they ignore their own limitations. You only get 157MB, you would be doing all of that crap for just one project as well. Things were workable when you could swap the map after entering the lobby but they killed that off too.

Hercanic wrote:Battle.net app? Looking it over, it seems like a primitive incarnation of Steam that only works for 4 games. If they treat it more like a launcher and less like a "keep me on all the time!" resource glutton

Fortunately, you can close it without issues after your game is launched (or at least SC2). Just annoying to start it off before I can start SC2. I did get it for the PTR.

Hercanic wrote:So 2.1 will finally be introducing real mods, eh? What a wonder. Only took 3.5 years. I'm kinda glad they chopped up the campaign into expansions and decided to commit; I don't think the editor community would have got near as much attention otherwise.

Better late than never. To be honest, I was 100% sure that they would NEVER do such thing even long after a 2nd expansion.

tf- wrote:There should be a way around the file size limitation at least, you can still have custom dependencies right? Then it's more of an account hosting size limitation, and maybe you can use dependencies in your mod that are hosted by other accounts, then it's a limitation of just how much money you are willing to give Blizzard just to host a large mod. :great idea:

I am pretty sure you can use mods from other accounts as well. In theory, yes, you can buy more accounts for more space. However, I think it would be much cheaper to ask reliable friends for their account space, preferably those that never make maps or mods of any kind (or that use little of their space).

I've already done space calculations for accounts. Something small, like AO 2, would need over 10 accounts. Yeah, no. Unrealistic, annoying logistically, and completely absurd to even consider. Even if I use the accounts of every single person I know who has the game, which screws them out of doing anything themselves, I wouldn't have enough for a small/medium mod.

If I thought about a serious sc2 project that needed MP, I would get the exe hacked to disable battle.net and use a local connection or a private server. Honestly, for a campaign, I'd probably do the same thing anyways because I'd have someone find how to re-enable those restricted triggers, and that would probably need the version to be frozen.

I mean, even if size was no issue, I wouldn't put a project on battle.net exclusively due to the censorship.

IskatuMesk wrote:Since the mods will be on battle.net they will never be "real" mods. Censorship and size limitations are still going to blockade you.

Maybe you can memory hack your way around that but I don't imagine that being terribly safe now that they also run md5 on a ton of files just to stop modders.

Yeah, the censorship bull still bothers me. Developers should never be held accountable in court for custom content created by fans. It's an utterly ridiculous but real notion that Blizzard is paranoid about. Despite hosting the content themselves, Blizzard shouldn't be any more culpable than any other hosting site is for what their users upload.

md5?

Hunter_Killers wrote:Any kind of mod making use of the full range of custom assets would be pushing several gb easily. Blizzard knows this as well because they ignore their own limitations. You only get 157MB, you would be doing all of that crap for just one project as well. Things were workable when you could swap the map after entering the lobby but they killed that off too.

According to Ahli, you can technically get unlimited space. Apparently, deleting just hides the files; Blizzard doesn't remove them from their server, so your map will still use a 'deleted' dependency if it was attached before deletion.

md5 aka hash checksums. They've built hashes out of all of their mpqs and such. I imagine that if the system sees a different checksum than what their build reports, you'll probably get banned. It's to stop mpq mods like the teamcolor mod once popular at Team Liquid (despite Browder himself saying he liked it).

The not deleting files thing sounds very Blizzard, but I would not rely on it. It seems inevitable such "hidden" files will be pruned.

Hunter_Killers wrote:Any kind of mod making use of the full range of custom assets would be pushing several gb easily. Blizzard knows this as well because they ignore their own limitations. You only get 157MB, you would be doing all of that crap for just one project as well. Things were workable when you could swap the map after entering the lobby but they killed that off too.

According to Ahli, you can technically get unlimited space. Apparently, deleting just hides the files; Blizzard doesn't remove them from their server, so your map will still use a 'deleted' dependency if it was attached before deletion.

There's a term for that. It's talking out of his ass whilst lacking any skills in anal linguistics.

These people that can't be bothered to take 2 minutes to test anything need to shut up about what is and isn't possible.

Speaking of retarded practices, publishing doesn't check nested dependencies. It's also still incredibly stupid to actually try using deleted items for an actual map. This is where you cross the line into "Why the fuck are you bothering at this point?". I wouldn't be surprised if they did just ban you or delete everything if you did get caught doing it.